Examples of Technology Integration
in History and Social Studies
Below you will find an annotated list of resources -- mostly essays and articles -- that deal with technology integration in history and social studies.
Tom Daccord's Technology Integration Projects
Rewiring the History and Social Studies Classroom: Needs, Frameworks, Dangers, and Proposals
Randy Bass and Roy Rosenzweig. White Paper for Department of Education, Forum on Technology in K-12 Education: Envisioning a New Future, December 1999. Thoughtful overview of technology use in K-12 history and social studies with brief examples from classrooms around the country.
http://www.air.org/forum/abBass.htm
History Matters: Essays on History and New Media
"Essays devoted to the theoretical and practical aspects of taking history into a digital format, including comments on design and technical factors." An excellent sample though most essays are geared towards university educators.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/
Best Practices of Technology Integration: Social Studies
This site is sponsored by the Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators, the REMC Association of Michigan, and the Great Lakes Educational Network (Glen).The lesson plans that you will find here have been written by practicing teachers and have been "kid tested" to work in the classroom.
http://www.remc11.k12.mi.us/bstpract/bstpractNew/SocialStudiesHS.html
Technology & Learning Netwwork: techlearning.com
The Technology & Learning Network encompasses Technology & Learning magazine, techlearning.com, and Technology & Learning Events. These companion media offer online, conference, and print avenues for providing administrators, technology professionals, and teachers with comprehensive, relevant, and authoritative information on technology trends, new products, news, and funding sources for their technology programs. Techlearning is chalk full of articles by teachers who have successfully integrated technology into their courses. Several contributions from history and social studies are listed below.
http://www.techlearning.com/content/about/techlearning.html
Phases of Technology Use and Learning
NCREL North Central Regional Educational Laboratory: Specializes in educational applications of technology to improve learning. Several recommendations below are drawn from their impressive array of resources.
http://www.ncrel.org/tplan/cbtl/phases.htm
Technology in the History Classroom: Lessons Learned After Four Years of Technology-Aided Instruction and Research
Tom Daccord began teaching high school history in 1985, but had never used a computer in the classroom before the fall of 1998. Thanks to the training he received from the school's computer department and administrators, he has been teaching laptop-based courses for four years now. In his classes students use computers to take and store notes, go on virtual trips, do web-based research and assignments, take tests and quizzes, turn in essays, make graphic-based outlines, produce slide shows and make documentary films. He uses computers to formulate web-based assignments, prepare graphic presentations, present CD-ROMS , grade essays and tests, record grades, create and maintain a course web page, send e-mail to students, and more. Read his story.
Michael Hutchison's Web Gallery
Michael Hutchison, an award winning social studies teacher, shows how a teacher can make use of the electronic revolution and bring both his teaching and his students' learning into the modern age.
http://www.vcsc.k12.in.us/staff/mhutch/ice2000/default.htm
Teaching History with Technology is an online journal (last updated in 2001) that offers examples of how to integrate technology into history and social studies classes. The articles, written by teachers, include learning objectives, a description of the activity, and an explanation of how it was used in the classroom.
http://www.caryacademy.org/historytech/Vol1no2/default.htm
Link to Learn: Teach Using Technology As a Tool
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has a Professional Development page with many different resources for Teachers. This site contains many lessons that integrate the Internet. These are categorized by grade levels and subjects. Of special interest to teachers will be the dozens of articles by teachers, many of them social studies teachers, who are practicing technology integration in their classrooms.
http://pd.l2l.org/success/index.htm
The Journal for Multimedia History a journal of history that uses hypertext and multimedia technologies to merge audio, video, graphics, and text into a form that can only be communicated on the World Wide Web (WWW) or on CD-ROM/DVD mediums. Though designed for college and university professors, there are articles of use to secondary school history teachers, for instance:
Un-Tangling the Web of Cold War Studies; or,How One Historian Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Internet.(Vol.3)
Teaching Islamic Civilization with Information Technology (Vol.1)
Student-Constructed Web Sites for Research Projects: Is It Worth It?(Vol. I)
Making History on the Web Matter in the Classroom
(Kelly Schrum, Published in The History Teacher, May 2001) "How do I wade through the overwhelming amount of “information” on the Web to access the remarkable array of historical documents and research now available online? How can I incorporate new media into my syllabi and lesson plans? How can I teach critical new media skills effectively, from identifying and evaluating websites to citing them appropriately?" Scrum introduces History Matters (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/) a site designed to meet a range of pedagogical, professional, and classroom needs.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/e2/makinghistory1.html
Using History Matters With a Ninth-Grade Class
(David Kobrin; Charles E. Smith, Published in The History Teacher, May 2001) Kobrin and Smith point out that sites like History Matters at http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu that help make the Internet safe and accessible for ninth graders. "Given a structure and guidance, students can generate their own questions based on their analysis of the historical record, and then form conclusions that they validate by the data that they analyzed. They can construct history—and know that’s what they’ve done, and why."
http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/e2/usingmatters.html
Developing a Model for Teaching Inservice Social Studies with Computers
Alex C. Pan , Ruth Koskela, Judson Lyon; University of Wisconsin at Whitewater argue that "integrating computers into social studies teaching and learning is desirable and highly recommended." They point out that today's computer technology has created an amazing learning environment and has changed the way teachers teach and students learn.
http://www.cssjournal.com/archives/pan.html
Making History Matter
Shannon Tate and her colleagues integrated community service and historical preservation for both English and Social Studies classes and created a Virtual Museum of the Unionville History.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/shantate.htm
The History Lab
The "History Lab" site is an exciting resource for upper-level teachers who want to use primary sources in their classes. It's an online lesson template where teachers create inquiry-based lessons similar to science labs -- studying real materials, working in-depth on a narrow topic, using a methodology, formulating hypotheses, "doing" the subject rather than just learning "about" it, etc... There are currently a small number of labs in the collection but that number will increase quite a bit this fall and will continue to increase. Use of the labs is free.
A Digital Journey Through the Past
Irene Huschak author. Altoona area high school students researched and wrote about local sites of interest, match old photos with text, and posted the results on the Internet so elementary students could read about their city's rich past.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/huschak2.htm
History Goes Digital: Teaching With On-line Primary Sources
Bill Tally gave students actual Library of Congress resources, such as Civil War photographs by Matthew Brady, that piqued student curiosity and fostered thinking skills as students analyzed these primary sources.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/tally1.htm
Multimedia Fun with History
Irene Huschak asked her students for pictures that were more than 50 years old and created a digital photo archive gave students a new appreciation of the area's past.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/ireneh2.htm
First-Hand History on Our School Web Site
"The authenticity of student writing for one another and their concerns make history come alive for Ruth's students. They can access the best of forty years' worth of writing from Southwords, our school newspaper, and see images of the past from the old school yearbooks. Read about how Ruth brings together a collection of articles and images from the school's past so that students today can learn about the lives of teenagers 15, 20, or 30 years ago. And see one example of a famous graduate's writing about her future."
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/jacobse2.htm
The Newspaper in the Old West: Designing and Producing an 1850-1900 Reproduction or Facsimile
"Calling on his 21 years of experience as a high school newspaper adviser, Bob incorporated various facets of journalism, newsletter templates, and research from the World Wide Web to produce a unit that his students in a 10th-grade American Literature class maintained interest in and enjoyed - a mock newspaper."
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/chesney2.htm
Investigating The Civil War: A Multimedia Approach
Michael Hutchison
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/civwarmh.html
Ellis Students' Global Perspectives
The Ellis School's Global Perspectives project involves 15 schools in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. The project involves "using a centralized Internet site to acquire information about the participating schools and student cultures and to conduct, and post results from, a student-generated survey that measures levels of awareness and concern about current global issues for teenagers at the allied schools."
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/stone.htm
What is Technology Integration and Where Does it Happen?
Adam Garry looks at why teachers anywhere in the world have different interpretations of what technology integration is tells us what he thinks it is and where it happens.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/adamgarr.htm
Collaborative Internet Learning: Strategies and Success Stories
Joanne Tate describes an assortment of cross-cultural technology-based globally-collaborative "ventures" including discussion with students in Japan to discuss both the Holocaust and Hiroshima and a National Identity Project in which students in rural Australia and in Moscow exchanged thoughts on their respective cultures.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/tate.htm\
Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Technologies Tool
The purpose of this tool is to help you select appropriate technologies by identifying the key advantages and disadvantages of each one.
http://www.ncrtec.org/pd/lwtres/eotut/eotut_0.htm
Designing Collaborative Projects For the Internet
Terry Kerns helps others avoid pitfalls and pratfalls and provides a comprehensive list of what to do and not do.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/kerns1.htm
Want to Use Technology Effectively? Try Starting With Assessments
Adam Garry and Parry Graham advocate building technology into the daily routine and say that the key is to begin with assessment, and how it will guide instruction, and then allow students to use technology as a logical tool in demonstrating mastery of educational objectives and standards.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/assessap.html
Creating a Class Newspaper
"Miriam considers information and communication technology to be a valuable tool that enriches her teaching and provides students with important opportunities to be creative in the learning process. She took a course at the University of Malta to study how children can become creative writers. She came up with the idea of encouraging her students to create a class newspaper using their own creative writing. This was a challenging project for eight- and nine-year-olds, but they lived up to the challenge. They created a wonderful newspaper, full of interesting articles, all colorfully displayed. Read about the process and the product."
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/grech.htm
Students Teaching with Technology
Sandra Hildreth's 7th- through 12th-grade Arts and Humanities students had one computer, but used it effectively to become self-disciplined collaborative workers and problem solvers.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/hildreth.htm
Collaborative Group Projects
Betty Smith provides an example of a group project that worked well at Christian Brothers High School in Memphis, Tennessee.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/bsmith.htm
Using Internet Know-How to Plan How Students Will Know
Judi Harris sorted through her many files of Internet-based activity ideas and classified them into 15 structural categories. She explains them and provides examples.
http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/mining/May93-TCT.html
Connecting Technology and the Curriculum
James Kelleher and Lynn Moore Benson outline their seven-step process for ensuring the successful integration of technology into the curriculum. They also outline approaches to assessing technology with an example of a rubric for editing student videos.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/jameslyn.htm
The Internet in Education
Arun Kumar Tripathi provides an overview of the Internet and its educational implications. Arun shows how some educators around the world have used the Internet in their classroom to enhance teaching and learning.
http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/WCE/archives/tripathi.htm
Planning an Online History Project
Designing an online history site
